


Vastly Hugely Mindbogglingly Big

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Misattributed quotes, implied interspecies moirallegiance, in which I take vauge implications about dogtier and run with them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:21:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space."<br/>- American cosmologist, Carl Sagan</p><p>You're almost certain Carl Sagan said that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vastly Hugely Mindbogglingly Big

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Latia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Latia/gifts).



There was once when Jade was very small - probably more than once, but there's one particular incident that stands out oddly clear in her memories - once, when she was a little girl, when she still had a grandfather and hadn't any reason to expect that she ever wouldn't, Grandpa let her stay up long enough to go out in the soft blackness of the island at night, and they'd gone out onto the hilltop near the house and watched a meteor shower. A real one, with no more esoteric source than the bits of the universe that by some great unlikely chance happened to cross paths with the Earth's atmosphere, to burn up harmlessly before they could strike.

She'd watched the streaks of light with wide green eyes, uncomprehending of how far the space debris had come, until she'd nodded off to sleep safely nestled between Bec's soft white fur and the course khaki of Grandpa's safari costume, and woken the next morning tucked into her own bed.

There's pretty much nothing about that scenario that still holds true, now.

 

Jade Harley is a physics prodigy, the godtier Witch of Space, and prototyped with the powers of a First Guardian, and she's still not sure she understands how Calliope managed to pull four sessions worth of players from paradox space and deposit them, alive, in the universe they'd _finally_ managed to cobble together. 

She'd seen how it happened, of course, but she doesn't have enough of a grounding in the theory of what the cherub girl had been manipulating to comprehend the process, or the vocabulary to explain it. She wonders if this is how early astronomers felt, back when they'd started to think that the universe was infinitely more complex than geocentrism could account for but didn't understand how it all functioned.

The multiverse is vast, in ways that Earth's most learned scientists never even really guessed at. Most of the time, she can handle it, although sometimes it makes her twitchy, knowing every inch of the new universe like the back of her hand. But sometimes the rotation and the orbit of the planet and the solar system's path around the hub of the galaxy and the galaxy's dance with its neighbors and the whole galactic cluster's inexorable arc through the universe and the universe's stately passage at a tangent to the Green Sun is simply overwhelming, and the idea of movement on a local scale as well seems completely preposterous.

Which is why, this afternoon, Jade is curled in as small a ball as possible on her bed in her room at the group's central agricultural station, white fluffy ears laid flat against her skull and knees clutched to her chest, with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Not that it helps a great deal.

She is desperately nostalgic for the days when all she had to worry about was suddenly and involuntarily falling asleep in dangerous situations. She's not sure how long she's been here today; she's always had trouble with time and it seems to be worse lately. Possibly the Heisenberg principle has something to do with it. She's uncertain.

Dimly, she's aware of the sound of the door opening and a light knock on the door frame, more an announcement of the visitor's presence than a true request for entrance. 

Jade considers saying "go away." She doesn't.

"You missed dinner," Kanaya says. "John and Vriska stopped in, but they didn't stay. They've nearly finished mapping the southern coast."

"We could do that, from here," Jade mutters.

Kanaya chuckles. "True, but it keeps them busy. I think that is worth something. Are you hungry?"

After a moment of consideration, Jade shakes her head, ever so slightly.

Kanaya sighs, and picks her way across the room, stepping between the various pieces of clothes and plushies and other detritus that tends to build up when Jade has not recently made an effort to clean her room. She sets a plate, filled with discrete portions of the various foodstuffs they've learned to produce reliably without resorting to one of the remnant alchemiters, on the nightstand next to the bed, and then sits carefully at the edge of the mattress. "Difficult day?" she asks, sympathetic. Kanaya is good at sympathetic. "I think I felt a planet fall into its sun a few light years away, earlier."

Jade tries to remember that particular event; having never ascended to god-tier, Kanaya's range of awareness is much narrower than hers. "I didn't notice," she admits, finally. "I'm not surprised, though. The little rocky one in the system with all the asteroid belts? Its orbit has been deteriorating for months now."

"Yes, that one," the troll agrees. "I had hoped it might stabilize again after that comet strike, but I suppose the orbit was too tight." She reaches out to gently run a hand over Jade's hair; hesitantly at first, and then again when the set of the human girl's shoulders softens.

"I'm sorry," Jade says, after another long pause. "I didn't realize how much more _complex_ a real universe would be than messing around in paradox space."

"It's not your fault," Kanaya assures her.

Slowly, Jade pushes herself into a half-seated position; Kanaya draws back and folds her hands in her lap, watching Jade with concern. The human tries to smile reassuringly, but it comes out more as a grimace. "I'm just not a lot of help around here, it feels like."

Kanaya shrugs; there's no denying that with most of the group out on exploratory missions, Jade's increasingly frequent incidents of intergalactic vertigo do interfere with their farm's ability to function. They aren't the only ones there, although most of the others come and go and the two of them are certainly the ones with the most experience in actually cultivating plants. And even there, Jade knows much more about growing food than Kanaya does. "It won't be too much longer before the weather starts cooling off. I expect some of the others will be back to winter here."

She thinks for a moment, then adds, "Do you suppose having one of the Void players here would help? Sometimes they can cancel out sensory-based powers."

Jade looks a little startled. "Maybe. One of the boys, at least, Roxy's powers are too focused to work like that, I think." She grimaces. "Also I'm pretty sure it would still be _really awkward_ to get me and Roxy in the same place."

"Equius might come, if I asked him," Kanaya replies. "We worked together quite a bit during Sgrub."

"Ok," Jade says, a little hesitantly, and leans her head on Kanaya's shoulder.

When she closes her eyes, it still does nothing to block out the green that's less a color and more raw awareness that somewhere, out beyond where "space" means anything, the Green Sun burns, but that's not quite so unbearable, when it's kind of balanced out by a slim, strong arm looping around her shoulders and careful fingers winding in her tangled hair.


End file.
